People don’t give names enough credit for having power.
You’ve all been on the playground as kids and either said or heard, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me!” Shakespeare, who named hundreds of characters in his career, didn’t even have much use for names: “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Let me tell you, names have power.
I’m a newcomer to Twitter, but I got involved in a very brief tweet war (a tweet skirmish, really, only a few shots fired) with someone last week. There was a long thread decrying a Texas judge’s decision that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional, and one of the participants, clearly an ACA supporter, referred to those who had both voted for President Trump and stood to lose their insurance as “idiots.”
Perhaps, I suggested, this label reflected a lack of empathy for the very people you claim to be having empathy for.
Perhaps, he replied, it’s hard to have empathy for people who can’t see the truth that I obviously know to be true.
Perhaps, I realize now, he was a Twitter bot designed by someone specifically to demonstrate this lack of empathy. I might have reached a human being; there’s no convinc
And there, folks, is the power of names. It is the power to label someone in such a way that either evokes or extinguishes empathy.
The book of Exodus, which Jews around the world will begin to read in synagogue this week, is called Shemot in Hebrew – not “Exodus,” but “Names.” In the very first chapter the Israelites go from being a free people dwelling apart in Goshen to being enslaved, in response to Pharoah’s fear that they might, “join with our enemies and rise from the ground,” causing the Egyptians to have to flee their own land.
“Slave” is a powerful name indeed. It gives permission to the slave-master, or the slave-owner, to treat the slave as subhuman, as an animal, or indeed as inanimate property. When the midwives in Egypt, who secretly desired to protect the Israelite children from Pharoah’s plan to kill the male children, referred to the Hebrew women as “chayot,” “animals,” Pharoah didn’t bat an eyelash. He had already concluded that these Hebrews were not human – how else could he countenance killing newborn babies en masse?
It immediately caught my attention, then, when I heard historian Annette Gordon-Reed on Hidden Brain last month referring to a historical figure as an “enslaved person.” Not a slave, but an enslaved person. The simple change of terms rehumanizes the individual, in a time period when he would have been legally considered only 3/5 human under the US constitution.
This is the kind of code switch that often gets labeled “political correctness,” as if changing terms to show greater respect for someone is a bad thing. Let me provide my own list of codes that could stand to be switched:
- “Person with an addictive disorder,” instead of “addict.”
- “Person with diabetes,” instead of “diabetic.”
- “Your patients who need translation services,” instead of “them,” “they,” or “those people” (as in, “Those people sometimes pretend not to speak English when they really do” because it’s so much easier to have your visit cancelled due to lack of translation services than it is to politely nod while the doctor talks at you in a language you don’t understand).
- “Person I care for” instead of “patient.”
These names matter. An addictive disorder may come up in a person’s past medical history; the label “addict” is usually included in the chief complaint (“41-year-old former drug addict presents with hip pain”) and affects the entire plan of care from the moment of first contact.
Being saddled with a label like this is a form of bondage itself, something that people are never able to escape because the label leads to a cascade of effects, closing off job opportunities, education, housing, and entry into community.
It’s up to people like you, healers and laypeople who bother to read what I write, to change these names, to model the behavior of switching to a more positive, uplifting code. And not by calling someone an idiot, or a racist, if they don’t use your code – that backfires.
Think about Moses – he saw the taskmaster beating the Hebrew slave and knew something had to be done to stop it (Exodus 2:11-12). He looked around and “seeing that there was no one about,” struck the taskmaster. The plain meaning is that Moses looked around to make sure no one would see what he was about to do, but the wording, “no one about” (ki ein ish in the Hebrew) reminds me of Hillel’s admonition, “In a place where there is no humans (she-ein anashim), strive to be a human (hishtadel l’hiyot ish).”
Moses wasn’t looking to make sure no one would catch him. He was looking to see if anyone else was going to step up. And as the commentary of HaKtav VeHakabalah points out, “He saw that there was no man of courage; not one of them took his brother’s travail to heart to try and save him.” It was Moses, or no one.
But Moses’ actions don’t end the way he had planned. Word gets out, the other Hebrews mock him when he tries to make peace among them, and Pharoah wants him killed, causing Moses to flee to Midian. Being a human, and making other people feel more human, comes at a high price in a world where someone benefits from their de-humanization.
I sincerely hope it doesn’t involve killing anyone or fleeing the country, but for patients, family members, and medical professionals alike, standing up for humanity can mean being dismissed from a practice, being cut out of critical discussions, being flagged as “difficult,” sacrificing professional standing or even losing jobs. Or burning out entirely.
Moses’ troubles with getting his message across don’t end there; his temper is a constant problem for him, with God, Pharoah, and the people. It takes Aaron, the softer-spoken, peace-making older brother, and Miriam, provider of life-giving water, to complete the mission and raise the Israelites up from slavery to freedom. And that is what we need as well – the courage to be human when humanity is absent, the eloquence to say it in a way that will rally people instead of putting them off, and the deeds of kindness that give life to our ideals.
But first we need a good name. I like the name the late Fred Rogers used to call everyone: “Neighbor.” As in, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
